That Way Lies Madness: A Florida Action Adventure Novel (Scott Jarvis Private Investigator Book 8)

by Scott Cook

  I also knew that the plane was controlled, aside from the thrust produced by the engines, from three types of control surfaces. First there was the rudder. This controlled the plane’s yaw, or left and right movement. Then, located on the horizontal tail wings were the elevators. These controlled the pitch of the aircraft, or its ability to go up and down. Finally, on the back of the wings were moveable surfaces called ailerons. These, when moved up or down, controlled the flow of air over the wings and thus the plane’s roll. The plane also had flaps on the wings as well. These I also knew helped to increase lift and drag for takeoffs and landings.

  As I settled into the seat, I noticed with some relief that the plane was once again moving straight and level. With no pressure on the control surfaces, the aircraft was more or less maintaining its heading and stability, although I could see by the artificial horizon that we were climbing ever so slightly.

  “Probably the airflow over the wings and the weight of the engines is pulling the nose up…” I muttered as I buckled myself in.

  I looked at the seemingly endless number of gauges on the dashboard before me and felt almost dizzy. I quickly found oil pressure, which seemed okay. I also saw that there was a digital altimeter next to the artificial horizon. This said three hundred feet and was getting higher ever so slightly each second. That was good. Better than heading down that’s for sure.

  Yet I knew that if the plane’s nose rose too much, it would stall. A stall in this case meant that the angle of ascent to speed ratio would rob the wings of lift. I wasn’t sure when that would happen, but the airspeed indicator read one-hundred and eighty knots and it was dropping slowly.

  “Scott! Scott!” This was Grayson’s concerned voice. “What’s your sitrep?”

  I laughed, “I’ve been better, Colonel. Let’s see… I’m now flying this bucket, for one. A stray shot seems to have wounded our pilot beyond his ability to fly. So… what should I do?”

  I heard Grayson curse and say something I couldn’t quite hear. Another man’s voice came on over the earwig. This man had a smooth and confident tone when he spoke.

  “Mr. Jarvis, this is Lieutenant Commander Neil Travis. I’m the pilot of the Colonel’s plane.”

  “Yeah…” I said, grabbing the yoke and pushing it forward ever so slightly to try and level off. “We met earlier.”

  “Right,” Travis said calmly. “Can you give me a quick rundown of your situation?”

  “We’re level,” I said. “Throttle setting is about… two-thirds. Artificial horizon and altimeter say I’m level at three-forty.”

  “Good, good… you sound like you know something about aircraft.”

  I scoffed, “A reader’s interest, Commander. I know the control surfaces and the basics… but I’m hardly a pilot. I think I can keep her level and straight, but…”

  He chuckled good-naturedly. I had to admit that his calm demeanor was helping me to stay calm, too.

  “Do you have anybody else onboard who can help?”

  Lisa appeared next to me with a look of surprise on her face, “Uhm… wow… I’ve got Sam secured and I’ve put a couple of blankets around the pilot and taped them. What can I do?”

  “Take a seat next to me,” I said and pointed at a pair of headphones slung over her yoke, “Put those on. Commander, I’ve got a second person with me in the cockpit.”

  “Excellent,” Travis said. “And let’s drop the formality, Scott. Call me Neil. Who’s your friend?”

  “Lisa Gonzalez… I don’t know anything about planes, though.”

  “Nice to meet you, Lisa. That’s okay… I’ll need you to help Scott with some small chores, okay? Now Scott, keeping her airborne and level is pretty easy. I can already see that you’ve got that covered. Look out of your starboard window.”

  I looked over and could see the Gulfstream flying alongside about five hundred feet away.

  “Glad to have you on my wing, Neil,” I said. “Flying like this is okay… but how the Christ do I get this crate down? I mean in one piece, naturally. Probably should’ve specified that.”

  Travis chuckled again, “It’s easier than you think. I want you to put her down right where you took off from. Best area around here. Now Lisa, I want you to keep your eyes on the artificial horizon… that’s the thing with the two colors and the little airplane that moves up and down and tilts when Scott does anything, you see it?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Okay, now I also want you to keep an eye on the altimeter and airspeed,” he continued. “That bird is based on a DC3, Scott, which has a stall speed of about seventy knots. Course that monster may be a bit different, so we’re gonna need to keep an eye on it. Now, the first thing I want you to do is throttle back until you’re doing about a buck twenty-five. That’ll give us time to make corrections and should be well above stall speed.”

  I reached over with my left hand and grabbed onto both of the knobs at the top of the twin throttle levers. I backed them down and they clicked as they moved through a series of positions.

  “One-fifty…” Lisa announced. “One-forty… one-thirty…”

  I went one more click down and she said one-twenty.

  “Great, that’s great,” Travis said. “Okay, Scott, you’re headed almost a hundred and eighty degrees away from the river. I want you to turn that bird very gently until your compass reads… three-three-zero. Now, to turn the plane, it’s not just a matter of the rudder pedals. What you’re really doing is banking the aircraft, you with me? As you apply left rudder, you’re also going to turn the yoke a little to the left. Very gentle roll. Normally, I’d have you apply just a touch of uplift too in order that you don’t lose altitude… but in this case, since you’re going slow, a little altitude loss is okay. You ready to try it?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be, Neil,” I said. “Preparing to shit my pants, sir!”

  He laughed, “all right, good attitude. Now, let’s bank her to the left. Lisa, you keep your eyes on the compass and read it out as he turns.”

  I took a deep breath and turned the yoke a few degrees as I pressed very gently on the left rudder pedal. The plane began to bank, very gently. I watched as the landscape through the front viewports began to tilt and slide by maddeningly slow.

  “One-forty… one-thirty…” Lisa was calling out. “Altitude now three-ten… three hundred…”

  “You’re doing fine, Scott,” Neil commended. “Better than most flight students. Give it just a smidge more rudder and roll, though.”

  The plane leaned over another five degrees and the course numbers began to fall off just a little quicker, as did the altitude. By the time I leveled off on a heading of three-thirty, we’d descended to two hundred and seventy feet.

  “Beautiful!” Neil exclaimed. “You’re damned near dead on. You should be able to see the river below you. Now what we want to do is tweak in some flaps. They’ll allow you to take some speed off and increase lift. Then we can increase your angle of attack… don’t worry about what that means just now. Set them to thirty degrees… Lisa, do you see the flap controls?”

  It took a moment but she found them and set the flaps as Travis instructed. The plane slowed further, down to about ninety knots and the nose wanted to come up again.

  “Good, good… your slowly climbing again, but that’s okay. Scott, I want you to angle her down about ten degrees. This’ll increase your angle of attack and let you descend under power. Your indicator should be just below the horizon line. Don’t worry, I’ve got my eye on you.”

  I pushed the yoke forward, corrected when Neil said it was too much and the altimeter began to fall with nerve-wracking quickness. The ground seemed to loom up toward us, the slim silvery thread of the slough through the sawgrass prairie growing huge.

  “Okay, you’re almost there,” Neil coached. “At fifty feet, Scott, I want you to level off. Lisa, if the altimeter starts to go up, adjust flaps to about forty degrees, okay? Now Scott, what we’re gonna do is have Lisa throttle back litt
le by little. You just focus on steering. Being in a flying boat, basically, this will be way easier than a runway touchdown. When I give the word, Scott, you’re going to pull back on the yoke, about halfway. At the same time, Lisa, you’re going to cut power by thirty percent of whatever it is, understand?”

  We both acknowledged. Neil said that once the plane touched down that it would be easy from that point on. Lisa would throttle back to just above an idle and I’d simply drive up to where the vehicles were parked. Easy as pie.

  “Yeah, easy for him to say,” I muttered and looked over at Lisa.

  She reached out and touched my arm, “You can do it, baby…”

  “Yeah, we’re all with you, dumplin’” Wayne chimed in.

  “Looking good…” Neil broke in. “Okay Scott, ease up on the yoke… that’s it… Lisa, throttle back a little… adjust those flaps… good, descent rate… good… thirty feet, twenty feet, stand by… Lisa go to two-thirds of your throttle setting, Scott pull back… you’re down!”

  The plane hit the water hard, but the inflated balloon beneath and the pontoons added their buoyancy. We bounced once and then settled back down, rapidly losing speed and plowing across the water. I guided the plane along the river and could see that we touched down maybe a mile from where it had all started. The airspeed indicator read sixty. Lisa throttled back to about thirty and we both breathed deeply, wiping sweat from our faces.

  “Goddamn!” Neil hooted. “Couldn’t have done it better myself, Scott and Lisa. Nice work.”

  “Hoo-rah!” Grayson, Stevvins and even Amanda shouted.

  “Uhm… Neil…” I began hesitantly. “How do I stop this damned thing?”

  Neil laughed, “Just throttle back to neutral. The plane will coast for a while. You can aim out of the river and onto dry ground, that’ll help.”

  We had slowed to about twenty knots as we drew level with the two vehicles. I could see Wayne, Jackie, Amanda and even Cynthia waving frantically as we went by. Lisa throttled back a bit too far and once again the engines coughed and went silent. I’d managed to turn the plane out of the river and we began to half slide, half bounce toward the tree line. I tried to turn away, but by now there wasn’t enough wind over the rudder for it to bite nor any water for the small rudders on the outboard pontoons to help… and we ran straight into the trees.

  “Well…” I said when we’d stopped, only having been jolted slightly. “We’re here!”

  “I’d like to thank you all for flying crazy stunts airlines,” Lisa said officiously. “Please gather all of your personal wits along with any excreta that may have rocketed from your clenched poopers and exit the aircraft in an orderly fashion.”

  We both laughed uproariously. The adrenaline still pumping through our circulatory system and the knowledge that we were alive and unhurt making us giddy.

  “Nice parking job, Maverick!” Wayne said over the comm.

  “Everybody’s a wise ass…” I muttered as I released my restraints.

  “Please explain exactly how you get yourself into these situations?” Sharon asked as she sipped her lemon drop martini.

  Juan Fuente grinned at her, “I think he’s just lucky.”

  Wayne scoffed, “Yeah, bad lucky.”

  “Oh, come on, Wayne,” Lisa chided. “We did get Shade, didn’t we?”

  “Did we?” I asked. “I wish I could be sure… Bill could’ve survived that fall.”

  Wayne’s face went darker than usual, “From fifteen feet at a hundred miles per hour? No way, Scott.”

  I didn’t want to argue. Wayne was probably right. And for his own peace of mind, it was better to believe that. This had been trying on all of us, but I think Wayne most of all. He’d lost the love of his life and for no good reason. I knew that the healing would take some time, but I also knew Wayne was a strong man and he already seemed to be coming to terms with it.

  We sat on the shaded deck of the Spindrift Grill, looking out over John’s Pass in Saint Petersburg. It was the first week of September and although it was still hot, a small hint of fall was in the air. There was just a slight dip in the humidity, at least at sunset. The twirling fans overhead helped too.

  A few tables down, set up on a small stage was Robbie Berry, the solo guitarist that had been playing the day I’d found out about “my” restaurant. He was playing Tennessee Whiskey by Chris Stapleton.

  “How’s Samantha?” Sharon asked.

  I sighed, “She’s back up in Rhode island at Butler. It’s pretty bad, especially knowing that now Bill is dead too. Ironically, though, the shrinks say that maybe that’ll help her. Part of her blames Bill for what happened to her, naturally.”

  “And what about Cynthia?” Wayne asked. “And Pauli Franco?”

  “Cynthia is fine,” I said nonchalantly. “Back home with her fortune intact. Last I spoke with Marie, Paul is doing better. Small slugs and they missed the vitals, so he’ll be right as rain in no time.”

  “Oh, goody…” Sharon grumped.

  I shrugged.

  “So, senor Yarvis,” Juan teased. “Is this one going to be a book?”

  I snorted, “Juan, if it’s not, my name isn’t Scott Motherfuckin’ Jarvis.”

  We all laughed and clinked our glasses.

  “Food is awfully good here,” Wayne commented as he sliced into a thick Porterhouse seasoned with a special blend of herbs and spices.

  “Apparently the chef has gotten quite a few suggestions lately,” Sharon commented as she carefully lifted a bite of a sautéed hogfish filet topped with a Key lime hollandaise.

  “Muy Bueno,” Juan agreed, scooping out a healthy bite of a secret from-scratch Texas chili. “Wonder what started that?”

  Lisa and I grinned, both of us having ordered the shrimp scampi over linguini with bacon wrapped asparagus and cheesy twice baked potatoes.

  It’s good to be the King!

  Who knows what drives some people. You think you know someone for twenty years and they turn out to be fruitier than a nutcake. It’s hard not to get introspective about that. Could Bill’s dramatic slide into the dark side happen to anybody? Could it happen to Lisa or Sharon or Wayne or me?

  Or is it only that some people are just more susceptible to evil?

  I don’t know if there is an answer. Perhaps for evil to flourish, there must always have been a strong germinated seed lurking below the surface. Bill Garelli spent his entire adult life exposed to the seedier aspects of the drug trade. His devotion and / or carelessness led to his wife suffering for his perceived crimes. Yet why hadn’t that happened to me?

  I’ve lost friends before. I’ve dealt with criminals. It could be argued that Scott Jarvis private investigator was far closer to the terminator between the dark and the light than Detective Sergeant Scott Jarvis had been. That I had to embrace part of my darker side in order to get the job done.

  So could I, too, slip into the darkness as Bill had?

  What about Wayne, who’s love had been ripped from him in an instant?

  I didn’t think so. In some there was the seed of darkness and in others, it was light. I think that people like Wayne, Sharon, Juan, Lisa and me fall into the second category. Our desire is to help others. Our core is light, and where light shines, darkness cannot thrive.

  However… you always have to be vigilant. I think that if you could go back in time and ask eighteen year-old Bill Garelli if he could even conceive of being Shade, he’d laugh in your face if he didn’t smack you. Yet he had done so.

  It never hurts to look deep inside yourself from time to time. Just to make sure the lantern is still lit. For my part, I try to make this a regular occurrence. Besides, a little psyche swabbing never hurt anybody.

  Epilogue

  The fall out of the cargo door was nearly heart stopping. Bill Garelli had only meant to push away from Scott so he could get his legs under him… but things had not gone as expected.

  The fall wasn’t really the problem. The airplane had barely lifted off and the
drop was fifteen feet and no more. However, the speed over ground was another matter entirely. It was this, more than anything that probably saved Bill, if saved was the right word to use.

  Rather than simply splashing into the six foot deep slough river, Bill had skipped across its surface like a stone. It felt like somebody had flung him across a gymnasium floor. Not as hard as concrete, for concrete was rough. Hardwood though was a more apt description. It became more so as he began to tumble as he slowed. His sidelong skitter across the water becoming a disorganized roll that immediately snapped both bones in his lower right leg and broke at least two ribs. This torment didn’t last long, though, as he quickly lost speed and fetched up into the saw grass along the edge of the river.

  Bill lay there in only a few inches of water, gasping for air, each breath a torture as his damaged ribs expanded. He also now truly understood why they called it saw grass. Hundreds of small slices covered his exposed skin, from his face to his forearms and his back and belly where his shirt had ridden up.

  Even as he lay there trying to collect what remained of his wits, Bill, or Shade, had to smile. Although injured and in pain, he was alive. As long as he had breath in his body, all was not lost.

  Of course, now that he was possibly a mile from where he’d parked the monster truck, the problem of how to get the hell out of the swamp was a considerable one. The intense sharp pain in his right leg told him that a jaunty stroll was probably out of the question. Maybe he could find a sturdy stick and use it as a crutch… but for the moment, he just needed to rest a while…

  As he lay there, the stinging cuts on his skin, the sharp agony in his leg and the oddly dull and yet stabbing pain in his side making the minutes seem to pass like hours, Bill became more and more aware of the sounds of the Everglades in the pre-dawn early morning. An occasional owl hooted. Several forms of night birds called out from the vastness around him. Insects chittered and frogs croaked… and the deep rumble of alligators on the prowl underscored the entire primeval symphony.